


The Way the World Ends

by takeintoaccount



Category: Pandemic (Board Game)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-09-15 11:21:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9232769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/takeintoaccount/pseuds/takeintoaccount
Summary: The red phone on the wall, the one that was only supposed to sound for an emergency, had been ringing for a full seven minutes. But everything was an emergency now, and David had no time to answer.





	

**Week 3:**

The red phone on the wall, the one that was only supposed to sound for an emergency, had been ringing for a full seven minutes. David had checked. But everything was an emergency now, and he had no time to answer.

The thing people didn’t understand was how long it took to cure a disease. It’s not like hundreds of the smartest people on the planet had not been trying. But there were strains to match and tests to run and studies to double and triple check. 

When the first strain had appeared in Karachi, no one had paid much attention. Until the soldiers started talking about it in their emails home. How fast it struck, that you were dead within three days. Cough on the first day, boils on the second, fever on the third. Once fever hit, you only had a few hours. The country was up in arms: “Bring our boys home!” Some came home, most stayed. 

Then it appeared in Delhi, then Kolkata. By the time it was in Hong Kong, it had mutated. Total time elapsed? Two and a half weeks. Seventeen days. On day eighteen, twenty-seven people died in London in three hours and the world went crazy.

Anna had arrived at the CDC from Montreal on day nine and hadn’t left. The only good thing about it all for David was Anna. They’d only ever exchanged pleasantries (that ended on day eleven) and shop talk. But she was cute and smart and was going to cure the world’s most disastrous pandemic since the Black Death, so David didn’t really care. Now she slept in the lab and barely said “thanks” when he left her coffee for when she woke and pulled herself out of the puddle of drool she left on her papers when slumped over her desk. David found it endearing.

Others flew in and out, bringing with them news and expertise from all over the globe, but Anna and David stayed. David constantly on the radio, or the phone, or even trying to patch people through on Skype, organizing meeting schedules and flight itineraries; Anna testing, and then testing some more, and then again and again. It was David’s job to know where everyone was at every possible second. It was Anna’s job to save the world.

He swiped away the live map he’d been updating, pulsing with differently colored dots where all the field researchers were, and threw his tablet on the desk, grabbing the red phone. “What?” he said, not even bothering to hide the impatience in his voice.

“Lagos,” yelled a tinny voice on the other end.

Half a glance at the map on the wall, the piece of yellow string pulled taut between Africa’s west coast and São Paolo that marked a flight path. “Fuck,” David said, and hung up the phone.

 

**Week 5:**

“Run this by me again? There’s something different about the Lagos strain?” the colonel said, pressing his fingers against his temples and squeezing his eyes shut.

“There’s a ninety-five percent mortality rate for all other strains. Lagos is only at seventy-two,” Rees said, working hard to keep his frustration to himself.

“Still more than half, but better than what we’d seen,” the colonel confirmed.

Rees exchanged a glance with Liza, who had been staring at the ceiling for at least five minutes. It had been a long meeting. “Additionally, it’s responding well to treatments.”

“So you need a team on the ground.”

“We do, sir,” Liza cut in. “And we need it immediately. There’s something about this strain, we can tell. And Ofeibea is telling us that they’re close to obtaining the sequence. We just need the samples and we can finish it here in our labs.”

“Look,” the colonel said, sitting straight and pushing his arms against the table. “Between us. The President is close to calling quarantine. We’ve avoided it here in North America so far, but with Mexico going dark yesterday, we have no idea what updates are coming out of Central and South America. If you send a team to Lagos and Congress passes the resolution, there’s a chance we can’t get them back in. And bottom line, they’re not getting samples back here. They sequence there or they don’t do it at all.”

“There are precautions--” Rees began.

“We understand, sir,” Liza interrupted. She ignored the glare Rees shot her way.

“They’re cleared then.” The colonel stood abruptly and gathered his papers. “Think carefully about who you send in.”

Rees and Liza watched him leave. “What the fuck, Liza?”

“Shut it, Rees. He’s military. I was military. I get it. It’s all about sacrifice and honor and putting your country first. He doesn’t care what we’re doing in Lagos, he cares about results and he just to be real about the possibilities.”

“I’m still going to order them in isolation the second they get there. Before even. We’ll have Huffman and Powers go with, send them in the air force junk to avoid civis, get them in hazmat suits an hour before landing.” Rees swiped his tablet awake, fingers flying over the screen as he spoke, programming alerts and setting his program to run contingencies.

“Do whatever you want. Just send the best. This could be the answer we were looking for.” Liza pulled out her phone. “I will literally sell my child to get Padma on this team.”

“We’ll get Padma,” Rees confirmed, distracted. “Have David call her in. Let’s give this twenty-four hours, no more. They ship out tomorrow afternoon.”

 

**Week 9:**

“We’ve been here four weeks? One day I’m going to tell my grandkids about how I lived in Nigeria for a month but never saw more than what I could see from the corner of a temporary research lab on the middle of an island.”

Christopher looked up from his laptop. “The window is covered in plastic, love,” he said cheekily.

Padma flipped him off and hopped off the stool she’d been standing on as she’d gazed longingly but futilely at the pale, frosted light seeping through the industrial plastic that formed the tent that covered the outside of the building. A light flickered. She tapped the bulb and it steadied. “Whatever.”

She slid her goggles and gloves back on, making her way back to her test tubes on the work table. 

“Mask,” Christopher said.

Padma ripped her gloves off and threw them into the bucket headed to the incinerator. She grabbed her mask and yanked on new gloves. “Whatever,” she repeated. “We’re not getting back anyway. All these precautions are just to delude us into thinking they’ll let us in when this is all over. They won’t.” She eyed the soldier watching her front the door, monitoring the situation, ready to report the tiniest infraction of quarantine procedures.

Christopher ignored her.

***

“Report from Chris and Padma?” Anna’s voice startled David from his stupor. He hadn’t really slept in two months.

“Uh,” he said, sitting up and looking at his map. “Good.”

“Good? Need a little more David.”

“They’ve got a two thirds of it done. The sequencing.”

“Didn’t they have two thirds of it done a week ago?” Anna whined, perching on the edge of David’s desk. He blushed.

“No, they had half of it done a week ago.”

“What happened to all the progress Rees and Liza reported on when this all started?” 

“I mean…” David trailed off, unsure of what to say. “It takes a long time?” 

Anna pierced him with a look and he shrugged. “I know,” she sighed. “Sorry to snap. Do we have any coffee?”

David shook his head. “Store was out.”

“They’re out of everything these days.” Anna stood up and walked away. 

David watched her. “Strike out,” he whispered, swinging an imaginary baseball bat. “Gotta step up your game, Davey.”

 

**Week 10:**

A new strain appeared in Buenos Aires in week eight. Reports were slow since Mexico went dark, though, and Congress didn’t hear about for eleven days. The Isolation Resolution was drafted the next day and passed two days after that. The United States closed its borders.

***

A couple things happen when only two people are left alone all day, every day: checkers and sex. Also arguing.

The guard only watched them in the lab itself. There was an annex, still under the ridiculous plastic tent but separated from the lab entirely, that housed Christopher and Padma’s cots and duffles. It also contained a small bookshelf (currently with nothing on it since all of the books that had been shipped over were simply in piles on the floor), a table and two chairs, and a water boiler. 

To call the lean-to an annex was to be far too generous. The little shack had been hastily constructed just hours before their arrival and shook in the warm breeze day and night. There were two extra cots, for team members - Ben Goldstein and Ben Wu, the Bens, everyone called them - who had been scheduled to arrive shortly after Christopher and Padma. They’d been waylaid in Madrid, though, and missed the isolation deadline. They were patched in via Skype over the shaky internet connection the lab borrowed from the nearby office building. Or, they had been until Goldstein died and Wu lost his mind and went catatonic. Apparently Madrid was bad. “Zombie movie bad,” Liza had said on the satellite phone when she’d called to give Christopher and Padma the news.

“Do you think it’s zombie movie bad out there yet?” Padma asked, mouth full of reconstituted vegetarian stew. The army had fought her hard but in the end caved and allowed her ration supply to be meat-free. She waved her hand toward Lagos Mainland. “We haven’t heard the call to prayer for a while.”

Christopher looked up from a book. His eyes were red and bleary. He blinked three times before he seemed to process what she’d said.

“Oh. Oh yeah, we haven’t, had we? Interesting.”

“Checkers or sex tonight?” 

Christopher choked. Padma waited. “How about both?” he said meekly, when he’d recovered.

Padma considered. “Two out of three. I win, sex. You win, also sex, but you do the dishes.”

Christopher chuckled. “Sure, whatever.”

***

“You do it.”

David pouted. “No. You.”

Rees bit his lip.

“Look,” Liza interrupted. “This isn’t going to be an easy call whoever does it. Just pick up the damn phone. Put it on speaker for fuck’s sake.”

Rees picked up the phone and dialed, punched the speaker button, then sat back while the call made its way through all of the channels and connections before ringing through to Lagos.

“Gupta.”

“Padma, hi. Hey. It’s Rees. And Dispatch Dave. Also Liza.”

There was a pause, some rustling, then Padma spoke again. “All right you’ve got both of us now. What’s the bad news, folks?”

“Isolation.”

A low whistle came through the connection, then Christopher’s voice. “It passed then?”

“Yeah,” David said. “Buenos Aires got it. Congress flipped. Everyone who’s out is out, everyone who’s in is in. People are going crazy over it. Protesters got as far as setting the White House lawn on fire yesterday.”

Padma laughed. Liza, David, and Rees exchanged glances. “Sorry,” Padma’s staticy voice said. “It’s just. They probably don’t even know what they’re fighting for. I’m surprised they have the energy.”

“It’s probably less that and more just plain anger,” Liza sighed.

“Anyway, let’s not get distracted here,” Rees interrupted. Liza smacked his arm and hissed, “let them distract themselves, you just delivered a death warrant.”

“We’ll work on a plan to get you out,” Rees said loudly, drowning out Liza.

“I know someone in San Francisco,” David piped up. “A specialist. She works with quarantine cases. I’ll ask her for advice, or call in some favors, or something.”

“That doesn’t matter if we can’t get this thing sequenced,” Christopher said. “Don’t worry about us right now. We’ll get back to work.”

Liza reached out and cut the connection. “Okay boys, get to it.”

***

Sometimes catastrophe reaches a point of normalcy in which disaster is no longer disaster. 

The act of going to the grocery store no longer resembled anything like the trips Jayna had grown up taking with her family. Ostensibly she was in line for Whole Foods, but that had stopped being a thing during Month 2. When people realized they didn’t care if their Veganic Sprouted Ancient Maize Flakes were really just called corn flakes after all. The only things people ever bought anymore anyway were water, cornmeal, and lard. Flour was too expensive because it had disappeared off the shelves fastest. Sugar, too. If you’d traded ration stamps on the black market, you might be able to buy some coffee beans. Whole beans only, since the ground coffee had also disappeared and no one wasted their rationed electricity on coffee grinders anymore either.

She handed her ration book to the armed man in fatigues blocking the entrance, rolled her eyes when he looked her up and down just a little too long, and snatched it back as soon as she saw the twitch in his jaw that told her he was about to ask questions. She didn’t really have time for questions. He waved her through and a little line of tension running from her shoulders to the base of her neck released, grateful that he was tired enough that the gun he held didn’t give him the motivation he needed to pick a fight with her. 

Her cell rang when she was glaring at a woman in silent argument over ownership of a jar of salt. She relinquished her hold.

“Wen,” she answered.

“Jayna, we’ve gotta get two people in from Lagos.” The connection wasn’t great, but Jayna could hear urgency in David’s voice.

“Above my paygrade, David,” she sighed, resigned. “Isolation. Read the resolution. Again.”

“Look, you and I both know there are workarounds.”

“That shit was written so that there wouldn’t be workarounds. Isolation doesn’t work when the powers that be sneak people in under the radar. You’re not stupid, David. You know that as well as I do. The borders have to stay shut. We haven’t had an outbreak yet, we need to keep it that way.”

“What about Seattle?” David pleaded.

“What about it?”

“There were reports--”

Jayna interrupted. “You’re not bringing them in via the west coast. Look maybe if you can get them to Paris, I can sneak them in through DC,” she said, shifting her bag of cornmeal to her other hand and tucking the phone against her shoulder. She tried to recall the map in her office that had become her life in the past three months. “Both cities are clear right now, I think. There’s probably a forty-eight hour window if you can get them out of Lagos right now. But do not send them anywhere else first, no layovers. Paris only. If you even think about Madrid or London, I will call it off right now. I swear to god.”

“They’d have to leave right now? But that’s--”

“Too bad. Lagos, Paris, DC, within the next forty-eight hours. It’s my way or the highway, David. Make it work.” Jayna ended the call. “Move, punk,” she said to the middle-aged man standing in front of her. She grabbed the last jar of salt, the one he’d been eyeing, and walked away.

 

**Week 13:**

The third time Padma coughed in a span of fifteen minutes, the guard by the door got antsy. After half an hour and countless more coughs, he left. Padma held up a middle finger at his retreating back, then whipped her bulky face shield off, leaving just her safety goggles and mask.

Christopher looked up, a crease between his brow. She shrugged. He looked away quickly and she pretended not to notice the tears well up in his eye. They were so close with this sequencing, there was no time to think about anything else.

She wouldn’t let him touch her that evening, curled up on her own cot, hiding beneath a blanket and reciting pi to avoid the panic she felt in the back of her mind. In the morning, she dressed quickly in the hopes of hiding the boils from Christopher, but he saw anyway. They didn’t speak for twelve hours. The guard never came back.

It had gone dark and then light and then dark again when Padma stood so fast she knocked her stool down. “I got it. We’re done. We’ve got it, Christopher. Get Anna on the phone.” Then she fainted.

***

“Where’s Padma?” David asked, leaning in. 

Christopher tilted his tablet away from the other side of the room, cutting off David’s view on the video screen. “Bathroom,” he answered. “Did you get the file transfer?”

David shook his head. “Look, you need a connection with more bandwidth. Is there no way you can get to the university?”

Christopher looked up. Padma was slumped over her lab station, head on her arms. Sweat beaded at her hairline from the fever that had risen in the last hour and a damp washcloth rested on the back of her neck. There had been no guards and no check-ups for three days now.

“There, uh, might be,” Christopher said.

“Can’t you just get one of the guards to take you?”

Christopher wondered if the guards had left any cars behind when they’d bolted. He supposed, if there was both a car and a gas can, and also they could get across the bridge to the mainland without hassle, and there were enough healthy people on the streets to give directions he could comprehend, he might be able to find the university and patch into their internet connection.

“Aren’t we literally here for the purpose of sending data back to you? Why the fuck isn’t our connection good enough?”

David held up his hands in defense and sat back in his chair, as if to give Christopher breathing room.

Christopher pursed his lips together and blew heavily through his nose. “We’ll figure it out. Just...don’t leave your connection until you hear from us again.”

“Roger,” David said. He seemed to know something wasn’t quite right. “Good luck.”

Christopher threw his tablet down on the table and went over to Padma. “Hey love,” he said gently, shaking her shoulder until she sat up and then resting his palm against her forehead. “Ready for an adventure?”

***

Sixteen cases appeared in El Paso so the CDC flew Jayna out to Texas to rip the governor a new one. The entire state was put on lockdown. Protesters chanted, “Don’t mess with Texas,” at the borders, and at least six people were shot with rubber bullets as they fought with police. But the quarantine held. 

***

The hard part wasn’t getting to the university, Christopher discovered. That was easy. The hard part was trying to hide from the mob with the guns who chased them down when they were spotted on campus. 

Padma had had enough left in her to call Ofeibea for tech help, and even enough left in her to claim she was feeling better, that her fever had possibly broken, an hour after they’d connected with David, as she and Christopher had watched the transfer percentage rise on the screen, closer and closer, and then finally, eons later, reaching one hundred and flashing completion.

But the mad dash back to the car, only to discover that the gas had been siphoned and the whole thing stripped for parts, had taken a lot out of her. The ensuing run from the folks with the weapons left her panting and seizing behind a dumpster as Christopher held his hand loosely around her wrist, monitoring her pulse but pretending it was purely for comfort.

“Three more minutes, then we run again, okay?” he whispered, pressing a kiss to her temple.

“You’re gonna catch the plague,” Padma whispered back.

He kissed her again, as if to prove her wrong.

He had a whole plan, to make his way through the back alleys to the market he’d noticed on the drive in, grab an abaya for Padma in the hopes of distracting from just how sick she was - he was pretty sure that was what the gun mob had been yelling about when they’d first noticed the pair and started the chase - and then bribe a taxi driver to take them back to the bridge, where they could walk the rest of the way to the island, patch through to David, and beg for a ride out of Lagos.

The plan didn’t work. He’d nodded off and seventeen minutes after his three minute deadline, a lone gunman from the mob found them behind the alley, yelled for his fellows, and shot the scientists. Lagos police chased the mob off, but then ran themselves when they saw Padma, eyes glazed with far more than just pain from a gunshot wound.

“Well. At least we saved the world,” Padma said softly, breath coming in shaky, short puffs of air. 

“Fuck this,” Christopher replied, slumping down and closing his eyes. He pulled Padma closer, ignoring the warm, sticky wetness of her blood on his hands.

“This is the way the world ends…”


End file.
